Sales of Houston's most affordable homes plunge

1of33In the Houston area, homes priced at $750,000 and higher saw the strongest sales gains at 12.3 percent.
>>Check out a few homes on the market for $750,000 and more...Photo: Nancy Sarnoff / Houston Chronicle

Houston-area home sales last month held up in price ranges above $150,000, but the number of homes that sold for less than that figure plunged, a new report shows.

Sales of homes priced between $100,000 and $149,000 were down 24.3 percent in November compared with a year ago, the Houston Association of Realtors said in a monthly report released Wednesday. Sales of homes below $100,000 were off 25.3 percent.

Sales of Houston's least expensive homes have been shrinking in recent years as property values have risen and there are simply fewer affordably priced homes.

Overall, the local market registered a 2 percent sales decline in November. Buyers closed on 6,159 single-family homes last month at a median price of $235,000 -- a 4.4 percent increase over a year earlier, according to the association, which looks at sales handled through the Multiple Listing Service in primarily Harris, Fort Bend and Montgomery counties.

Year-to-date, sales are 4.6 percent ahead of last year's record volume.

"The Houston housing market remains on track for another record year, which was an almost unimaginable concept when the year began, on the heels of so much devastation from Hurricane Harvey," HAR Chair Kenya Burrell-VanWormer with JPMorgan Chase, said in the report. "As 2018 draws to a close, we see slow but steady growth in the supply of housing as well as a strong job market, which together make for a healthy real estate climate."

Inventory registered a slight improvement, edging up from a 3.6-months supply to 3.9 months at the end of November.

Nancy Sarnoff covers commercial and residential real estate for the Houston Chronicle and the paper’s two websites: Chron.com and HoustonChronicle.com. She also hosts Looped In, a weekly real estate podcast about the city’s most compelling people and places. Nancy is a native of Chicago but has spent most of her life in Texas.